Who's down with LoC?

Okay, I'm ashamed to say it. I've lived in DC pretty much my entire life, and I have just now found out about the awesomeness that is the Library of Congress. I mean, I know my way around THOMAS, but yesterday I went there to see their exhibit on cartoons/caricatures, and ended up registering as a researcher. That means, according to their website, that I now have 130 million volumes (counting books, videos, periodicals, etc) available to me, free of charge. And here I've been dragging myself from university to university in the distant suburbs, when one of the world's greatest libraries is right downtown! I'm going to be spending a lot of time there. Plus, the Jefferson building has one of the most beautiful interiors I've ever seen. It's the kind of place that elevates research to an art.

In other news, this whole literature search is going more slowly than I had anticipated. Work has been rough (crunch time) this month, and I've been exhausted when I get home, which is not conducive to teaching yourself new concepts and reading technical papers. Then when the weekend comes, there's always things to do and invitations to hang out with people...it's hard to say no, especially since I don't have a near-term deadline, and I'm not technically a student. When reading papers, I'm still fighting that basic tendency to skip the equations, and forcing myself to sit and work through them is slow going. The one upside I've noticed recently that neural nets and neurology are still holding my interest just as much as (if not more than) when I started in on this, which is a good sign that I might not get bored devoting a large chunk of my life to this.

I am making some progress, though. My BAM is working, and I've taught it some short tunes, represented in an extremely simplistic format. I've also come across Boston University's Cognitive and Neural Systems department, which has quickly jumped to the forefront of my interest. Putting their neural network studies into their own program seems to have given it the kind of focus and slant I want. I've been reading a lot of Grossberg's stuff as a consequence, and it's interesting. I'm currently on "ARTSTREAM: a neural network model of auditory scene analysis and source segregation", but his LAMINART model really interests me too.